Roarke MenziesKazoo! HQ, Guelph ON, April 8

Helming a complex nest of analog effects pedals, loopers and mixing boards, Brooklyn-via-Vancouver Roarke Menzies set to work filling Kazoo! Fest's spacious gallery headquarters with heavenly vocal drones that washed over all with celestial warmth. It all took on a deeply hypnotic quality when Menzies started introducing fluttering palpitations that swelled into a storm cell of rumbling volume.

While this first piece offered a relatively contained view of Menzies' process, a second work that incorporated a talk box — "Elegy" — emphasized his artistic relationship with spatial immersion when, in the middle of the track, he activated a contact mic fixed to the gallery HVAC system and a faint rattle was amplified into a wall of snowy noise.